How Borders, Boundaries and Bedlam Define History in Saadat Hasan Mantos story Toba Tek Singh

The paper explores the madness created by borders and the traumatic, bloody event of the Indo-Pakistan partition, in the discourse of the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto's iconic and widely translated short story "Toba Tek Singh". Set in a mental asylum at Lahore , a couple of years after Partition, the story begins when the Governments of India and Pakistan decide to exchange ,on the basis of religion, the lunatics lodged in the asylums of their respective countries. The situation becomes chaotic for the inmates: Hindu and Sikh lunatics are to be sent to India and Muslims to Pakistan. Geography has been changed and the question asked by the lunatics "How can they be in India a short while ago and now suddenly in Pakistan?" articulates the absurdity of the political strategists of the time. The irony is clear: Who, then, are the actual lunatics? Among the inmates is Bishen Singh, whom everyone calls Toba Tek Singh, after the name of his native village. His bewildered, plaintive cry "Where is Toba Tek Singh?" resounds like a tragic refrain. To him, nothing matters, except that he doesn't want to leave the country where his village is located. The blow falls: Toba Tek Singh is in Pakistan and he, a Sikh, must cross the border and move on to India. On the cold morning of the exchange of lunatics on the border, Bishan Singh refuses to move till with a loud, piercing scream, he falls down dead on no man's land that lies between the two countries, thus resolving with his death the dilemma that he could not endure in life. The paper, hence, articulates/debates/emphasizes the issue of sanity vs. insanity in a world that claims to be politically correct, even while everything in it goes absurdly and ruthlessly wrong.